Deacetylation of IFIT2 mediated by HDAC5 promotes the stemness and progression of glioma

Abstract Background Glioma is the most common primary brain tumor, and the tumor stemness is a major regulatory factor affecting the progression, metastasis and recurrence of glioma. Recent research has shown that, nonhistone acetylation is widely involved in key cellular processes, including stemness regulation. The deacetylase inhibitors are promising new drugs, but their application and molecular mechanism in glioma have not been elucidated. Methods CCK8 and colony formation assay were used to detect cell proliferation, transwell assay was used to detect cell migration, flow cytometry was used to analyze cell apoptosis, sphere formation assay and western blot were used to detect the status of stemness. RNA-sequence, quantitative PCR and western blot were performed to screen the key molecules mediating LBH589 function. Immunoprecipitation (IP) and western blot were used to analyze the acetylation level of IFIT2. The SiRNA target HDAC4 or HDAC5, overexpression plasmids of acetyltransferases were used to identify the acetyltransferase and deacetylase regulating IFIT2. The regulatory mechanism was explored by IP and ubiquitination analysis. Finally, the xenograft tumor model in nude mice was constructed and further analyzed in vivo. Results The data showed that IFIT2 mediates the HDACi LBH589 inhibition on cell proliferation, migration and stemness, and contribution to autophagy and apoptosis in glioma. And the down-regulation of IFIT2 in glioma was confirmed to be related to its deacetylation by overexpression HDAC5, which promotes the stemness and progression of glioma. Further, deacetylation of IFIT2 by HDAC5 was demonstrated to induce its ubiquitination and subsequent protein instability, which led to loss of anti-tumor activity for IFIT2, and acceleration to glioma stemness and progression. In addition, the results indicated that IFIT2 inhibits PKC pathway, and suppressing of IFIT2 promotes tumor growth in vivo. Conclusions These results not only clarify a novel post-transcriptional regulatory mode of IFIT2, but also provide a new sight of molecular mechanism for HDACi in glioma.